


Why you should research European cultures before writing fantasy stories based on them

by HandmaidenOfHorror



Series: Nonfiction and Metafiction Archive [7]
Category: Frozen (Disney Movies), Six of Crows Series - Leigh Bardugo, The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Analysis, Cultural Appropriation, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:14:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23716522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandmaidenOfHorror/pseuds/HandmaidenOfHorror
Summary: Mostly me ranting about Frozen 2 and Grishaverse (spoilers to all of both series), and especially cultural apropriation in them.
Series: Nonfiction and Metafiction Archive [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1532405
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Why you should research European cultures before writing fantasy stories based on them

Even when working from home, a quarantaine means surprisingly a lot of free time on my hands that I cannot fill with my usual activities, which led me to watch and read a lot things I wouldn’t be watching or reading otherwise. As usual, many of those things annoyed me. In this stand alone article, I wanted to focus on phenomenon that I saw in many English-original works, but which particularly annoyed me as I encountered it in a concentrated dose recently. Namely, cultural appropriation of European cultures.

Thankfully, modern English-language fiction in general is realizing that both works with only white characters with it or works where characters of color are only portrayed in stereotypical and/or minor roles are kinda icky, but there’s still a lot to improve, and some diverse media end up falling into worse stereotypes than they intended to avoid (I’m not saying Voltron, but… hell, I’m saying Voltron). And Disney is the biggest offender (I will never forgive the portrayal of Xiongnu, the ‘Huns’ in Mulan).

Out of the whole Disney Animated canon, there are exactly three films that have none of the following flaws:

  1. intellectual property theft
  2. ethnic stereotyping
  3. dehumanization of irl ethnicities
  4. whitewashing of adapted material
  5. boring, predictive plot



Those films are Lilo & Stitch, Moana (though those two only because I know _very_ little about Polynesian cultures) and the original Frozen (borderline example, as most the film _is_ boring and predictive for a mature viewer). Which is why the sequel infuriated me so much.

What did we have in Frozen? A pretty realistic misch-masch of Nordic cultures. As far as it was from The Snow Queen, the setting and culture was recognizably Nordic, just as Wakanda is a recognizably African setting instead of being America with Black actors.

What did we have in Frozen II? The North American Settler-Native conflict not even pretending to be about Norsemen and Saami. In the film, the previous cultural references mostly disappear. Instead, the viewers are presented with a pumpkin-obsessed autumn celebration that is all but named the Thanksgiving, and the Saami-adjacent Northuldrans only having raindeer herding as something they share with real life Saami culture.

The portrayal of Northuldrans annoys me the most. The whole culture with real life counterpart is extremely othered in the movie, presented as people impossible to understand, with which the movie seems to agree, as magic user Elsa goes to live in the wilderness with people who are strangers to her while her muggle sister gets to rule the muggles. The whole tribe is reduced to magical Natives, both literally and as a reference to a literary trope. And, to add insult to the injury, Elsa and Anna’s mother looked utterly unlike Northuldrans despite apparently being one. Who was she? The movie was not interested in exploring that plot hole.

The same problem I encountered in Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. The stories are set in a supposedly fantasy culture counterpart Europe, but they achieved the dubious feat of being both incredibly generic (change proper names and a few other details and they would pass for X-Men stories) and incredibly offensively stereotypical.

There’s nothing Russian in the Grishaverse-Russia other than random misspelled words used out of context and the barbary!, darkness!, despotism! and MURDER! stereotypically associated with Russia abroad. If you are vaguely familiar with Russia and Russian language, those books are downright painful to read.

Similarly, giving Grishaverse-Scandinavia pseudo-nazi characteristics only shows that European cultures are exchangeable to the author, and makes me wish that the issue of cultural appropriation was applied to European cultures in social justice discourse. It’s particularly offensive because Denmark and Norway were freaking invaded by the Nazis and both people and governments tried their damnest to safe their Jewish citizens.

There’s also the matter of romance, though it annoyed me less that the general cultural fuck up pile up. It is very mild in Frozen 2, but Kristoff spends almost the whole movie thinking about himself – he wants to look good to Anna, but not really focuses on what she may want. This may pose problems for the two in the future, but as I said, it is a minor problem that I’d agree is reaching in search of problems. In Grishaverse, on the other hand, the problems are glaring. Namely, Mal is bastard who only looks good because the alternate love interest is Magneto a’la Grant Morrison.

Through the series, Mal remains an asshole preoccupied with feeling better than Alina AND making her feel hurt because of him, sleeping around while calling her a whore for, gasp, wearing Darkling’s colors. He’s basically toxic masculinity incarnate. Most infuriatingly, the narrative agrees with him – he is never found to be in the wrong, never made to apologize, and in the end the heroine loses the things that make her special so that she can live together with the boy I wished died two books ago. This ending is only a step better than Voltron’s disastrous treatment of Allura. How can you read the books and think this is a happy ending for the girl? COME ON.

The romance I actually liked in the books was between Nina and Matthias, the classic foe romance in the vein of numerous Gundam shows, a romance you all wished reylo was… and then the boy died in an extremely anticlimactic way. I literally chuckled when it happened (“Pffff what.”), as an extremely serious scene turned out to be bathos instead. It didn’t fit the narrative at all. It was blatantly forced.

I cannot say I can guess the (not very good) author’s motivation, but the impression the resolution gave me was that people who did bad things don’t deserve to live even after they changed. Which is unintentionally harsh, perhaps, but this interpretation of the book may have dire psychological consequences to children who think they have done very bad things. In the mind of a 12-year-old, telling the teacher that another student broke the school rules would be equal to hunting sympathetic witches. And leaving them with “and thus he had to die” is… not a well-thought conclusion.


End file.
